By Kotie Geldenhuys
Photos/images courtesy of Pexels and Wikimedia
A 14-year-old boy wakes up disoriented and shivering on the floor of a friend’s home in Johannesburg, dressed only in his underwear, as the sound of keys rattling at the front door breaks the silence. Around him, other partygoers begin to stir amid the chaotic remnants of the previous night: scattered chip packets and roughly 20 empty two-litre bottles of Sprite littering the room. Still struggling to focus, the boy sits up, his vision blurred. He notices about ten empty cough-syrup bottles lined up on the kitchen counter beside more soda. The group, he later recalls, had spent the night drinking “lean” (Kunene, Pretorius and Van Dyk, 2022). But what on earth is “lean”?
The drink’s origins date to the 1960s in Houston, Texas, where it later gained prominence through hip-hop culture (Houghton House, nd). Today, the trend has spread globally, with the mixture commonly consumed as a cocktail of cough syrup and fizzy drinks or fruit juices (Essack, Groenewald and Van Heerden, 2020).
A growing body of research and local reports highlight increasing concern over the use of “lean,” a dangerous recreational drug cocktail also widely known as “purple drank” or “sizzurp” (Kunene, Pretorius and Van Dyk, 2022).
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[This is only an extract of an article published in Servamus: June 2026. This article is available for purchase.]